Why does your profile picture have a baby on it??

by phil on Saturday May 16, 2009 11:30 PM

Feminist Katie Roiphe inspired a very passionate reaction from MetaFilter (183+ comments) when she suggested that women who put their kids on their Facebook profile pictures are a blight on feminism.

The choice may seem trivial, but the whole idea behind Facebook is to create a social persona, an image of who you are projected into hundreds of bedrooms and cafes and offices across the country. Why would that image be of someone else, however closely bound they are to your life, genetically and otherwise? The choice seems to constitute a retreat to an older form of identity, to a time when women were called Mrs. John Smith, to a time when fresh scrubbed Vassar girls were losing their minds amidst vacuum cleaners and sandboxes.

(Read the rest of Katie's article on doubleX.)

And this is a response on MetaFilter that I particularly liked:

I used to make a really conscious effort not to talk about my kids too much. I didn't want to be one of those women Roiphe describes as having completely lost their identity. But then I realized that other people spent a hell of a lot of time talking about their work, their bosses and their coworkers.

(Read the rest of jrossi4r's comment. Read the entire MetaFilter thread.)

These events—when a good online community blows its lid off—are always a treat for me. In this case, for example, I jumped to all the comments with 10 or more favorited score and just basked in the rhetoric. In about 10 minutes, I quickly the absorbed some major talking points on feminism and meta-feminism.